


Jump, Read, Fight (the Ezekiel Jones remix)

by distractionpie



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Remix, Season 1 era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-06-21 17:44:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15563094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: Ezekiel thinks Flynn has a thing or two to learn.





	Jump, Read, Fight (the Ezekiel Jones remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fight, Read, Jump](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5507591) by [paranoidangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paranoidangel/pseuds/paranoidangel). 
  * In response to a prompt by [paranoidangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paranoidangel/pseuds/paranoidangel) in the [remixrevivalmadness2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixrevivalmadness2018) collection. 



Ezekiel hadn’t expected to enjoy hanging out at the library so much, when he’d taken the job he’d been ready to cut and run as soon as things stopped being interesting, he certainly hadn’t expected to be spending time there when he didn’t need to.

But the chairs are comfy, he inexplicably gets a perfect internet connection on his phone no matter how many floors down he is, and by babbling on about video games every time Jenkins tries to talk to him he’s successfully convinced the old man to leave him in peace.

He’s laid claim to one of the comfy armchairs and is messing around on tech forums, posting responses to help requests that look like nonsense at a glance but will actually lead to great improvements for anybody who can figure out the puzzle Ezekiel’s wrapped his advice in.

When somebody walks in, Ezekiel can tell from the sound of the steps that it’s Flynn so he doesn’t look up from his phone — Cassandra or Stone would probably chat and Eve seems like she’s compelled to check in on the LITs whenever she sees them but Flynn is usually caught up in his own things and at any rate likes Ezekiel the least of the LITs.

Which is why it’s a surprise when he stops.

Ezekiel ignores him at first, assumed Flynn has just been struck by a thought and will go racing off again any moment, but then he realises that Flynn is staring. At him.

“What?” he says, looking up. For once he genuinely isn’t doing anything he shouldn’t, not even anything borderline, unless Flynn has decided that he objects to Ezekiel hanging out here.

Apparently he has, although it seems it’s the hanging out part that bothers him more than Ezekiel's presence.

Flynn is such a Luddite sometimes, he sounds about ninety as he complains about Ezekiel being on his phone and assumes that the only thing he could be doing on there is playing games.

Well, Ezekiel doesn’t much care what Flynn thinks of him. He’s earned this break.

For a moment he thinks Flynn is going to let it go, he even starts to walk away, but then he turns, says, “Come with me,” in that tone he uses when he’s asserting his responsibility as the most senior librarian, and bounds back into the library.

Ezekiel stays put and finishes writing out his post. He’s not going to totally ignore Flynn’s command, he doesn’t actually want to pick a fight with the guy and honestly he is kind of curious as to what Flynn wants, but there’s no harm in making him wait for a few minutes. Flynn’s ego is big enough as it is, Ezekiel doesn’t want to add to it by letting Flynn think he’s at his beck and call.

It’s easy to follow Flynn once he decides to though, of all of the team Eve is the only one who even comes close to matching Ezekiel’s grasp of stealth.

Somehow, he’s not surprised when he finds that Flynn has headed to the sword practise area. Flynn has an unhealthy attachment to sword fighting, Ezekiel is pretty sure that he considers Excalibur his best friend, and he’s already dragged Stone and Cassandra into it, so it had only been a matter of time before he tried to foist his weird hobby on Ezekiel too.

Flynn tosses one of the practise swords in Ezekiel’s direction and he just barely managed to catch it, rearranging his grip until it was like how they held swords in the movies.

He tried a few swings, attempting to match Flynn’s attempts, but he had to concede it wasn’t as easy as the senior librarian made it look. The sword felt heavy and unbalanced in his hands, swinging a hunk of metal around didn’t really draw on any of Ezekiel’s skills, at first he kept trying just for the sake of proving Flynn wrong, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen he let the point drop. "Okay, so you've proved I don't know how to sword fight,” he conceded, refusing to sound embarrassed — it was the 21st century, when was he ever going to _need_ to sword fight?

"So what will you do if you find yourself being attacked by someone with a sword?" Flynn lunged then, and Ezekiel was pretty sure Flynn was trying to make him jump but he didn’t flinch. Flynn wouldn’t hurt him to prove a point, if nothing else Eve would have his head on a platter if she found out. Flynn asking such a stupid question did surprise him though.

"I'm not going to be holding a sword," he pointed out, because this whole lesson was pointless. Flynn was so confident in the strengths of his own skill set that he couldn’t wrap his head around the other librarian’s having their own methods that suited them.

"All right, so what would you do if you were attacked by someone wielding a sword when you were unarmed?" Flynn asked.

That was a much better question and Ezekiel grinned.

“Run away,” he said, because tactical retreats were one of the best sorts of tactics, and just to be extra helpful to Flynn, he demonstrated.

Flynn didn’t follow but Ezekiel suspected that Flynn wasn’t going to drop his determination that all the librarian’s in training be able to sword fight.

Ezekiel could handle that though.

After all, there has to be a YouTube tutorial for this stuff he could use. Next time Flynn tried to give him a lesson, Ezekiel was going to get the jump on him.

 

* * *

 

Ezekiel had broken his phone.

Or rather, Ezekiel had valiantly sacrificed his phone for the greater good during a particularly tricky library mission.

But did any of the others have any sympathy for his great loss in the line of duty?

Of course not.

In fact, they weren’t just unsympathetic, they were downright cold.

Eve had said, “These things happen,” and, “You can pick up a new one tomorrow,” as if that were any consolation and as if all the time Ezekiel had spent downloading apps and tweaking settings until his phone was the pinnacle of technology meant nothing.

Stone had been even worse, grumbling that perhaps the loss of his phone was a good thing because it would mean Ezekiel would go outside for once - as if he didn’t spend plenty of time using his phone outside.

Cassandra had tried to relate, talking about the time she’d ruined one of her favourite sweaters by wearing it on a messy assignment, but it wasn't really the same.

Jenkins had ignored his plight entirely, which given Jenkins’ general view of Ezekiel and technology was probably the kindest thing he could have done.

Flynn, unsurprisingly, was baffled.

Ezekiel knew that Flynn owned a phone, but he was pretty sure it was ten years old and Flynn only used it for actually calling people - and even that he only did when he was all out of other options.

Flynn didn’t understand why Ezekiel would even cares about his phone when he had the library right there.

Well, Ezekiel was having none of that. "What use are books when you can find everything on the internet?" he said. Half the reason the mission had been such a mess was because it had taken them so long to find the information they’d needed in the enormous and unintuitively catalogued library. If they’d just been able to google it then they probably could have had the whole job wrapped up and been home in time for lunch.

Flynn shook his head, with the misguided disdain of a man who’d clearly never learned about the convenience of search engine operators. "There are books in here that no one else knows the existence of," he said, tone reverent.

Ezekiel was proud of not rolling his eyes. Flynn’s words were almost certainly true, but Ezekiel suspected that in a lot of cases it was because those books were dusty old tomes filled with useless information that nobody wanted or cared to know about the existence of.

Still, he took a look at the book Flynn handed him. It had almost certainly been in the library longer than Ezekiel had been alive, but it wasn’t one of the really old books that were full of unbearable old-timey English like ‘forsooth’ and ‘verily’. "The Completely True Adventures of Amy Greenfield,” he’d never heard of it, which Flynn probably thought was a good thing but Ezekiel wasn’t so sure. “Best seller is it?"

"Never been published," Flynn responded, which wasn’t exactly promising, but then he said, "She bound it herself," which was a little more interesting. These days anybody could put a book together, which Ezekiel generally thought was a good thing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t respect somebody going hard enough to manage it in a pre-amazon era.

Flynn was still talking about the book, written by a librarian —surprise, surprise— and, "Read it, see what you think."

Of course that was Flynn’s angle. For a smart guy he was really predictable and not very subtle. “Nah.” Ezekiel handed the book back to him. "A little bit too inactive for me,” he said, and then, just to see the look on Flynn’s face he added, “Reading's boring.”

It was a good shout. The look on Flynn’s face was fantastic. If Ezekiel’s phone wasn’t smashed into tiny non-functional pieces he’d have taken a picture.

He left before Flynn could realise he was being messed with and ruin the joke.

Still, maybe he’d go back for the book later. Just to keep him occupied until he could replace his phone. Who knew, maybe Amy Greenfield could give him some ideas of the sort of things librarians could do for fun. After all, they couldn’t all have been grumpy technophobic stick-in-the-muds.

 

* * *

 

Flynn might be great at flashy heroics, and as far as Ezekiel was concerned he was welcome to them, but one of these days the fact his first instinct wasn’t to duck when the bullets started flying and then there’d be trouble.

Not death, Ezekiel didn’t believe for one moment that Flynn would go down like that (in fact, he suspected that at least some of Flynn’s heroic confidence had to stem from secret librarian powers that just hadn’t been revealed to the librarians in training yet), but Ezekiel didn’t want to deal with a whole mission being slowed down because Flynn had got himself shot and the others were freaking out about it.

Which was why he needed to learn at least a little of Ezekiel’s style.

Using the same method’s Ezekiel had taught himself with.

"You are supposed to jump," he said, watching as Flynn fell down the chasm and died. It was pretty cool getting to be the one who knew everything instead of the learner for once.

"I don't think this is teaching us anything,” Flynn complained, but Ezekiel knew it was just the same thing as him complaining things were pointless when he didn’t want to work at them. Flynn wasn’t in the habit of doing things he wasn’t already good at and it was easier to claim he didn’t want to try than to be seen struggling. It was the same reason that Ezekiel had brought one of the practise swords back to his apartment. Better to improve in secret and make it look like it all came naturally.

He lined up a shot on two bad guys and said, "Yes, it is." Flynn might not think video game tactics would ever come in useful while working as a librarian, but Ezekiel had a feeling he’d need them one day. And there were building a solid skill base. "Reflexes, tactics, problem solving. Fight the bad guys, find the treasure. Just like real life."

Except in real life Flynn probably wouldn’t have accidentally killed him a minute later. Hopefully. It would be a while before Ezekiel would be encouraging Flynn to try these skills in the field.

Flynn frowned, looking guiltier than a video game death deserved. It was good thing Ezekiel had decided not to start him with an online game, where you never knew when your teammates might turn on you and if you messed up you got yelled at by twelve-year-olds. "I think you're better off playing with someone else."

 Oh, no way. Ezekiel grabbed his arm. If he was putting up with Flynn’s ridiculous sword-fighting lessons then Flynn was going to learn at least the basics of video games. "You play until you're a bit less crap. Granted, I've never seen anyone quite this crap, but at least you can't get any worse."

One thing to Flynn’s credit, he wasn’t a quitter. He picked up the controller — immediately sending his avatar calling into the chasm.

Well, they might need a lot of gaming sessions in the future to get Flynn up to scratch.

Ezekiel could live with that. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've been so excited for my first chance to take part in some fic remixing and even more excited when I saw there was Librarian's fic available to remix. I've been wanting to try my hand at writing Ezekiel for a while and the original fic for this really inspired me.


End file.
